"a mistake repeated more than once is a decision"

Friends,

2 useful things today

1) A legit productivity hack

Earlier this year I read Nir Eyal’s book Hooked: How To Build Habit-Forming Products which I found enlightening on multiple levels (my notes).

Considering the topic, I’m not surprised to find that Nir wrote a book prior to that called Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life.

I didn’t read that one but I just listened to his informative interview with Jim O'Shaughnessy:

???How To Become An Indistractable Force (Infinite Loops podcast)

If you want to get what YOU want done in this life but keep getting in your own way, this is essential listening. Specifically when he gets on the topic of timeboxing which I do a variation of but didn’t know it had a name. I figured it out from trial and LOTS of error (and still need to do better).

If you want to zero in on that, check out his post:

Timeboxing: Why It Works and How to Get Started (2 min read)

In my opinion, the most crucial insight is that the definition of success is:

“did I do what I intended to do without getting distracted?”

It seems subtle compared to what we normally consider success — “how many boxes did I tick-off on my to-do list?”

But the difference is life-changing not just in terms of output but I sincerely believe — happiness. Nir makes a bold claim that he suspect many overachievers have likely not experienced true leisure. You either immediately “feel” that claim or not.

I’ll close my discussion of this with this banger quote from the interview:

A mistake repeated more than once is a decision.

2) Getting started with coding

Every 6 months or so someone will tell me their kid is interested in coding. Where should they start?

And every time I crowdsource the answers from the Twitter hive because it seems like a question whose answer changes as fast as technology.

Feel free to comb through the responses. Fwiw, these were the ones I found most compelling:

• Replit’s 100 Days of Python
• Learn Python The Hard Way course
• Codemonkey
• Code.org’s Hour of Code

In the past I’ve found DataCamp. Khan Academy, and W3 Schools useful.

I like Google’s Colab (a version of Jupyter notebook) a great way to just start practicing simple scripts right on the web without dealing with installations.

In general, I think you want to move from the absolute basics to working on a project or game far earlier than you think you are ready. In an age of LLMs, it’s never been easier to proceed as if everything you think you should know really deserves to be classified as “need to know basis”.

Just start hacking away immediately. By analogy, it would be like starting to write a sentence in a foreign language and being ok just looking up every single word instead of gong thru a textbook and learning “foods” then “greetings” then “colors”.

Stay Groovy

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